Popularity of digital products in online social tagging systems

Using data from an online music discovery and listening website, Last.fm, with more than 186,000 tags applied to 12,523 musicians and 12,717 pairs of network ties among 1892 listeners, this study investigates brand popularity in online social tagging systems. We use a multiplicative simultaneous-equations model to test the hypotheses. We find that a brand’s niche width (measured as the width of consumers’ categorizations of a musician through social tags) and audience consensus about a musician positively influence a musician’s popularity online. However, a brand’s niche width negatively influences audience consensus, highlighting the complex situation of brand strategies that extend to broad categories. We quantify and contrast the elasticities of a brand’s niche width in the direct and indirect effects on brand popularity. The results show that a brand’s niche width produces higher response elasticities in the direct positive effect on brand popularity than in the indirect negative effect through audience consensus. Brand age positively moderates the relationship between niche width and brand popularity. Consumers’ online connections also influence brand popularity: a higher density network leads to heightened popularity. These results offer important implications for brand promotions on social media platforms.